The feather and the riot helmet,

Water and steel, water poisoned

It makes you sick, makes your eyes burn.

It comes from a can, could come from the river.

 

They prohibited the potlach and the Sun Dance.

At Standing Rock, people share, and people dance.

They never left, never went, never died,

Never will.

We never ceased to torture them.

 

John Wayne once said he didn’t feel it was wrong

That his ancestors felt it right at the time,

Do you feel it is right today?

The song of oil, so sweet, so crude,

Is it louder than your humanity?

 

To clear the land, like Sheriff Kirchmeier,

Doing his job. Just another guy.

Way back a Kirchmeier was

The worker of a church estate,

Collected the tithe, fatten up the clergy.

 

Can you hear the ice breaking?

The children crying as they flee?

Can you see the species dying?

Do you hear about the stock market climbing?

Can you smell the smoke, the sacred?

Do you have the means to live with your Polyvinyl Chloride?

Do you think there will no bill to pay for this?

 

And you, in spirit and in mind,

Did you care as much when our victims

Didn’t wear the gorgeous feathers

Like Dan Nanamkin? Some romantic Coachella shit?

When they are ragged old women asking for change?

 

The water in the plastic bottle, Kirkland, I believe,

The foster-child of bloodshed, plastic trash, and the stressful rush.

This bottle may one day become part of something greater,

A marine trash vortex, perhaps,

And will still be here when this whole thing plays out.